In recent years, mobile wireless communications have become increasingly popular. Initial implementations of mobile Wireless communications, for example in the form of cellular telephone networks, supported circuit switched voice communication services. The carriers developed short message service (SMS) technology to provide text and/or email communications via the wireless communication networks. As the public wireless communication networks have evolved to provide greater bandwidth and packet based services, the industry has developed a variety of data services, such as web browsing, as well as a variety of services using multimedia message service (MMS) technology.
As popularity and demand has grown, subscribers have increasingly obtained service for a number of mobile stations (with individual mobile directory numbers or “MDNs”) under one mobile subscriber account with the carrier providing services through the mobile communication network. For example, a family may have mobile phones for both parents as well as a mobile phone for one or more of their children. Verizon Wireless, for example, currently offers private customers up to five stations/numbers under one account/billing subscription.
There have also been situations in which notifications were provided to account holders. For example, a recent FCC Mandate requires a communication to the account holder or subscriber when certain pertinent information on an account is changed, such as when the account password or billing plan had been changed via web access or as a result of a phone call or in-store communication with customer service personnel. There are any number of different techniques to send such notifications that will satisfy the FCC mandate. However, the cost to send the change notification to the customer varies depending on the notification method used.
To insure effective communication of such notifications, Verizon Wireless implemented a hierarchical delivery approach, which utilized one or more electronic delivery methods as the first attempts, which tends to ensure that the communication reaches the customer quickly and at the least cost. When each method was exhausted, a more costly communication method would be employed. For example, a first try might involve sending an SMS message to the account holder, then if the SMS delivery is not successful, the next try might involve sending an email. However, with such past notification systems or techniques, failed SMS notifications were only reattempted with email notifications. Hence, there were still instances where communication attempts might fail (after SMS and email failure) with no further attempts, resulting in situations with little or no likelihood that the subscriber would receive actual notice of the account change. Also, there was not a temporal check on the notification addresses. As a result, notifications might be sent with very recent address information, which actually is more likely to be inaccurate.
Hence, further improvement is possible. It is desirable to allow significant account data changes to be cost effectively communicated to the customer, preferably with a high likelihood of success.